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Don’t toss the meds, but passion might heal pain

Sometimes love does feel like it should.Falling in love can act as a potent painkiller, and now scientists have figured out why: It stimulates the brain’s reward pathway, much like the rush of an addictive drug.

WASHINGTON — Sometimes love does feel like it should.

Falling in love can act as a potent painkiller, and now scientists have figured out why: It stimulates the brain’s reward pathway, much like the rush of an addictive drug.

The next question is whether better understanding of the love-pain relationship might somehow help scientists tackle chronic pain. Falling head over heels isn’t exactly something a doctor can prescribe.

But “maybe prescribing a little passion in one’s relationship can go a long way toward helping with one’s chronic pain — assuming it’s passion with the one you’re with,” said study co-author Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of pain management at Stanford University.

The story begins with psychology professor Arthur Aron of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who studies the neurology of love. His work has linked that euphoric phase of a fresh romance to brain regions rich in the chemical dopamine. Dopamine is key to what’s called the brain’s reward pathway, the feel-good mechanisms that encourage certain behaviours. Eating sweets, for example, boosts this system — and addictive drugs like cocaine hijack it.

“When people are in love, in many ways it’s not dissimilar to what they get when they take amphetamines or stimulants: They’re very excited, have loss of appetite, sleep loss, they’re active, full of energy,” noted Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a dopamine expert.

Then pain specialists noticed that if someone in an intense romance gazes at a picture of his or her amour while being poked or prodded, they feel less pain.

Is that because their love is distracting them from the pain? After all, specialists often advise sufferers to listen to music or try other steps to take their mind off the pain. Or did love work some other way? Mackey and Stanford colleague Dr. Jarred Younger teamed with Aron to find out.

They put up campus signs seeking love-struck Stanford undergrads and within hours couples were flocking in, “the easiest study we have ever recruited for in my entire career,” said Mackey.

It was found the brain can generate pain-controlling responses without medications that perhaps, “if we understood them better, we could trigger them,” said NIDA’s Volkow.